It is only reasonable that a company that spends a considerable amount of money for different marketing means such as print ads, articles, online ads, brochures, videos, exhibitions, new logo design, mailings and much more, would like to have a clear answer as far as results are concerned.

Unfortunate there is hardly a qualified feedback to this question.
An answer might be possible if one compares marketing
campaigns over years and than attempts to draw some kind
of conclusion. However, even in that case, who can validate that
better results are due to the exhibitions attended, the ads printed,
the improved brochures, or simply because a new product has
been released? A small, but potentially very misleading exception
may be the online activities, counting clicks and visitors. But what
people often forget looking at these counts of clicks is that online
marketing activities would not have the same results if the company
did not do all the other marketing activities. In marketing, everything
is connected in one way or the other. Here is an example: A
customer calls because he read an article in magazine "X" and is
interested in the described product. He may even tell you he only
called because of the article. But in reality, the fact may be that he
once just passed by your company booth at an exhibition without
even asking for information, saw an ad about the product, and a
workmate casually mentioned the product once. Finally, he saw the
article, and made the decision to call. He indeed does not know
that it needed those four encounters to make the decision for the
call. Studies show that in many cases a person has to come across
a product several times before the decision is made to contact the
company or to buy a product.
So if there are no qualified answers in terms of marketing results,
what is the right approach?
1) Continuity: Regardless of what marketing effort is chosen, there
must be continuity. It is highly counter-productive if there are always
changes. A company should select their marketing strategy
carefully and than maintain it for a year or better two before reflection.
If a company invests a big marketing effort for a few months
only and then "disappears" again, or changes strategies all the
time, this is likely to harm the company's reputation because the
customers may draw the wrong conclusion.
2) Diversity and synergies: Try to diverse your budget into exhibitions,
online and print ads, articles, mailings and so forth. Use synergies,
which means if you have published an article or interview, put
it also online. Use the link in mailings or prepare a separate paper
print for hand-outs at exhibitions. Or if you have a product video,
make sure that it can be seen on YouTube, web home-pages, etc.
However, most important is the understanding to look at the results
of the whole marketing package, rather than trying to figure
out how many sales leads came from the January ad or article of
magazine "X".

Best Regards
Andrzej Wojtas (Ph.D.), Chief Editor of MFN, E-mail: andrzej@mfn.li